Digital Marketing for Startups – 10 Tips to Increase Marketing ROI
If you want to build a startup that thrives, digital marketing should be a crucial component of your growth strategy. Failure to understand the impact of digital marketing on everything from investor funding to customer acquisition and press coverage, can significantly impact a company’s prospects. Startup founders and entrepreneurs who understand just how effective digital marketing can be in driving their company’s growth are significantly more likely to build companies that outshine competitors. If you want help increasing marketing return on investment (ROI), here are 10 things that you could integrate into your startup’s growth strategy.
1. Build a Blog
If you do only one thing this year to improve your startup’s marketing efforts, work on building your business’ blog. A startup blog packed with helpful information for your target customers is like a salesperson marketing your company on a 24/7 basis. Focus on providing quality content that addresses your customers’ most frequent questions and optimize your blog posts for keywords your customers will use when searching online. You won’t regret investing in your startup’s blog as it can contribute significantly to your traction rate (awesome signal for investors!).
2. Learn from and delight your early customers
Pay close attention to your first customers and do everything in your power to ensure your startup exceeds their expectations. Your first customers will often turn into your first brand ambassadors. Going above-and-beyond to keep them happy is crucial if you want to increase your growth rate. Ask them how you’re doing, ask them how you can do better, and don’t take their loyalty for granted. Understanding your early customers can give you some of the most valuable insights about your product or service and help you not only improve the offering, but also fine tune your marketing messages and articulation of the value proposition, both of which can significantly improve your marketing ROI.
3. Start Marketing Analytics early
Having a significant marketing spend does not need to be a prerequisite for having the right setup for analyzing your marketing campaigns. In fact, getting started with the right tools and setup before spending your first marketing dollar can be key to the success of your marketing campaigns. Understanding early what works and what doesn’t can help you allocate resources to the channels and tactics that work best and drive the best ROI on spend. Scaling marketing efforts without fully understanding what channels and tactics work best and how they interact with each other can seriously impact results. Read our blog post, Understanding Marketing Effectiveness and Site Engagement, to get started with the basics
4. Diversify your marketing strategy and channels
Having a diverse startup marketing strategy is crucial for optimized results. Your startup growth strategy should include multiple components including SEO (search engine optimization) blogging, social media marketing, email marketing, customer surveys, and forum posting. Understand which departments/individuals are responsible for each component of your startup marketing strategy, who is responsible for measuring results, and how results will be measured and distributed to your team.
5. Understand your customer
Customer acquisition and analytics are absolutely essential for startup success. If you’re not analyzing your customers’ needs, identifying opportunities, and tracking your interactions with current and potential customers, your startup is likely to die a premature death. Far too many startup entrepreneurs have attempted to build businesses based off of an idea, without a clear understanding of market needs and a target market’s willingness to pay. Take the time to analyze the market landscape for your startup and understand what has made players successful and which strategies have not worked. Autopsy.io is a great resource that you can leverage to understand how critical customer analytics is for startup’s survival.
6. Stay focused on your long term KPIs
Stay focused on your long-term startup marketing goals if you want to be successful. Have a plan-of-action to achieve specific KPIs (key performance indicators) and don’t allow ‘shiny object syndrome’ to cause you to deviate from your marketing plan. It’s too easy to become enchanted with a new social media marketing tool or hop on a marketing trend instead of focusing on your startup’s long-term marketing plans. Know what you want your team to achieve, how you plan to achieve your goals, and which actions you plan to take to ensure your startup’s growth trajectory continues to accelerate.
7. Find the right talent for the job
Marketing is one of the most critical investments you can make as a startup. It is tempting, in the early days of a startup, to opt for low cost providers, typically freelancers, for your marketing needs. Going with a freelancer is not an issue in itself. Freelancers can provide high quality output for the appropriate task. Certain marketing tasks can be accomplished very effectively using Freelancers such as getting a Logo designed or writing a blog post. However, as you think about longer term and higher spend activities such as building your brand, SEO optimization for your website or blog and multi-touch paid advertising and consumer experience, you need someone who understands your product and value proposition, spends enough time with your team to understand the company’s roadmap and goals and is working on an end-to-end marketing strategy and execution rather than a point project. Committing to a full-time, in-house resource is often not affordable and not scalable as your marketing needs evolve and expand from simple tasks such as logo designs and web design to full funnel content strategy, SEO and paid ads. An agency with broad expertise and specializing in working with startups can be an excellent way to get started with a medium to long term marketing strategy that can yield a meaningful ROI. Read our blog post, 6 Key Areas to Explore before selecting a Marketing Agency, to learn about what to look for in an agency before deciding whether they are the right fit for your startup or not
8. Write as a Guest blogger/contributor on sites and content in your company’s niche
Guest posting and blogging on a variety of websites is essential for startup success. While your own startup blog should be your top priority, don’t overlook writing opportunities on Quora, LinkedIn, and blogs/websites within your niche. Search online for ‘contributor guidelines’ + your startup’s market sector to uncover opportunities to write about your startup. Pay attention to monthly traffic numbers as well as the social engagement rates of a site you’re considering guest posting on. Just because a site has lower traffic numbers, that doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t a profitable opportunity if their audience is engaged and thriving. Focus on connecting with a community relevant to your niche and your guest posting efforts will be well rewarded.
9. Invest in Copywriting, not just Content writing
Copywriting is essential for increased conversions. Copywriting is different from content writing. A copywriter is laser-focused on sales conversions and their content reflects their expertise. Working with a talented copywriter can be significantly more expensive than working with a content writer, but your sales conversions will make the investment worthwhile. Understand the difference a copywriter can make to the conversion rates and success of your landing pages and email marketing campaigns and you’ll be well on your way towards sustainable sales
10. A/B Test, Learn, Iterate
Always have a learning agenda for your marketing spend. Learn the fundamentals of A/B testing and how different ad platforms and website tools (e.g., Google Optimize, Optimizely) help you accomplish it. Test channels, test images and copy in your ads, test ad types (image, carousel, text, etc.), test your targeting, test landing pages. Find the combinations that work best and test further to continue optimizing. Be very diligent about designing the test. While A/B testing can be an extremely powerful tool, it is not very difficult to design a test incorrectly and end up with unusable results. For example, if you are testing conversation rates from two versions of a landing page, make sure you have the same ads, channels and targeting driving traffic to them. If the source of traffic is different, the difference in conversion rates observed may not be related to the landing page versions at all. Often times, such errors in testing can be completely inadvertent. Spend the time to clearly define what you’d like to learn, what the KPI (key performance indicator) is and how the test will be set up before executing it.
The bottom-line
Digital marketing for startups is essential, but it’s not something to be attempted without strategic planning. Integrating these top tips for startup marketing into your business planning efforts can increase your chances of long-term success. Growing a company from a startup to a successful enterprise is an endurance game and the right marketing strategy can be a key contributor in winning it.